![]() ![]() ![]() Emacs’s Evil plugin is widely praised as the single best Vim emulation there is. And as my objective with this series is to explore the good parts of different editors, I eventually opted not to continue C-bing and C-ping around documents, but rather to set up sensible key bindings so that I could take a proper look at Emacs’s famous extensibility.Īnd by sensible I mean Vim-like. So Emacs’s default key bindings suck, even if you remap your Caps Lock key to Ctrl 1, and especially if you’re accustomed to the relative lack of chording in Vim. This notation takes a little getting used to, but quickly becomes entirely natural and logical. C-k M-x means “press Ctrl-k and then Alt-x”.C-x A means “press Ctrl-x and then Shift-a”.x means “press x” and X means “press Shift-x” between two letters means “hold these down together in a chord” and between two letters or chords means “press these sequentially”. In this convention, C means Ctrl or Cmd and M means Alt or Option (older keyboards had a Meta button instead of an Alt button). If you thought quitting Vim was bad, quitting Emacs is even worse – you have to press Ctrl-X then Ctrl-C! A mere ten minutes into the Emacs tutorial, I could already feel the RSI setting in.Ībout keyboard commands: Throughout the remainder of this article, I’ll be using the Emacs/Vim convention for writing keyboard commands. And because Emacs has a tonne of features, it relies on sequences of chords for many actions. And because Emacs predates modern conventions like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, they’re a different set of key chords to everything else. Like most modern editors, and unlike Vim, it’s not modal, so doing anything other than entering text requires key chords. Especially because Emacs, at a basic level, is not a good text editor. And after surmounting Vim’s initial learning curve and getting Stockholm Syndrome comfortable using it for my every text-editing task, I didn’t really feel like going back to those confused and unproductive early days of learning my editor. EmacsĮmacs is a fine operating system in need of a good text editor.įorget the Linux desktop, it’s time for the Emacs desktopįor a guy who uses Vim as his primary editor, switching to opposition – even temporarily – is not really an appealing prospect. The obvious next thing to cover was, of course, the other venerable old programmer’s editor. In the second article, I looked at Acme, a fascinating editor/file browser/shell hybrid that’s sadly been passed over by time, and which, despite some intriguing features, I could never really use for serious work. ![]() In the first article, I covered Vim, which had at that time been my primary editor for about two years. When I started this series of posts, I didn’t expect to take a five year break between the second and third entry. ![]()
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